Podoba kondicionálového auxiliáru ve staré češtině
| Title in English | The form of the conditional auxiliary verb in Old Czech |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The study is based on analysis results of the formal and functional properties of conditional auxilary verbs (i.e. the forms bych, by, by, bychom, etc.) in selected Old Czech pieces of literature, namely in Tkadleček, the Bible of Olomouc and Sunnenday and Holy Day Talks (Řeči nedělní a sváteční) by Tomáš Štítný. The specific forms of the verb být (to be), which survived and are present in New Czech in the forms bych, bys, by, etc., were originally Proto-Slavonic sigmatic aorists. In Proto-Slavonic, these forms in combination with the l-participle probably also functioned as a plusquamperfect (or past perfect). The Czech conditional probably derived from it. A complete survey into the period at which the transformation of the plusquamperfect into the conditional was completed has not yet been conducted. Therefore, it can be assumed that in Old Czech pieces of literature, the observed forms appear in the following three functions: the aorist, which disappeared from Czech in the course of the fifteenth century; the original auxiliary verb of the plusquamperfect; the conditional auxiliary verb. The form of the auxiliary verb být (to be) in the conditional was probably not fixed either because in the course of the development of the Czech language, it underwent a series of (sometimes regionally differentiated) changes. As has already been mentioned, the form stemmed from the aorist forms of the full verb být (i.e. sg.: 1. bych, 2. by, 3. by, pl.: 1. bychom, 2. byste, 3. bychu); however, due to the gradual integration into the conjugational system of Czech , its forms were modified in a variety of ways (for example 1st person pl. bychme/bychmy/bychome/bychomy /Gebauer 1909: 143/ etc). The main goals of the present study are: based on an excerpt of evidence and its subsequent analysis, to describe formal and functional properties of these forms at the turn of 15th century; and to confront them with existing knowledge found in traditional grammars. |
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